Jason and Clive were in the waterfall room in Jason’s cloud house. The walls were still covered in writing boards and they were looking at a section where Clive had scrawled small, densely packed notes.

“I think enhancing your portal ability might actually be viable,” Clive said. “The key is using the cloud constructs from your cloud flask as the medium. Boosting the power would wreck you very quickly, but I believe the cloud flask can handle it. It may not be higher rank than you, but it’s a growth item, so the potential is there, and it’s extremely robust.”

“But?” Jason prompted.

“On the astral magic side, I think we have everything covered. It’s your instinctive understanding of astral forces, along with the items you’ve absorbed, that are making this possible, so leveraging them is the easy part.”

Jason looked at the walls covered in months of painstaking work by himself and now Clive.

“That was the easy part?”

"The trick is integrating the enhancements into the cloud flask. This is trickier than just shoving some materials into the flask to get the desired result. We'd need to shove you in there, and I don't think that's the way we want to go."

“We need to leverage the bond between myself and the cloud flask,” Jason said.

"Yes. We need to develop some manner of interface that creates a very specific exchange through that bond, and this is where my understanding falls short. I'm not too humble to claim that my understanding of artifice is rather good, given that it's outside my specialty field, but we are way beyond my level of expertise. Not only is a cloud flask breathtakingly complicated by even growth item standards, but you've made modifications. Not just the shoving stuff in it kind, but the way you've connected to it."

“Yeah,” Jason said. “There’s the spirit domain, plus I turned it into an item set with my sword and amulet.”

“I’d like to know more about the item you used to do that. I should learn as much about it as I can.”

“Sure,” Jason said as a pair of cloud chairs rose up for them to sit in. “It was called a soul-imprinting triune, and it was unranked, like an essence.”

“Where did you get something like that?”

“You know my looting power gives me additional rewards from especially dangerous and powerful enemies.”

“Yes. It replaced the power that gave you odd missions, yes?”

“The quest system, yeah. My own private Adventure Society. Anyway, I was in this city, buying time for evacuation before a monster wave started – this was right before I ranked up to silver. I killed a gold rank monster and looted the–”

“You killed a gold-rank monster?”

“More like finished it off after it crossed a dimensional boundary the hard way. In fairness, it killed me first.”

“You didn’t tell us about this when you were talking about what you did over there.”

“I’m sure Farrah told you more than I did,” Jason said.

"She said there were some bad days."

“This was one of those. It was a big city with a lot of innocent people and not enough time to get them out.”

Jason smiled, forcing himself from dropping into a funk.

“We helped a lot of people those few days,” he said. “Yes, a lot died, but there’s a lot of people who didn’t because of people who stepped up. I spent a lot of time dwellings on the leaders of the organisations I dealt with over there and how generally crappy they were, but most of the rank and file were basically adventurers, doing their best to help people. Fighting hard and making sacrifices. Arabelle says I should focus on that when I’m thinking about those times. It helps, I guess.”

"You don't have a lot of background on the triune, then, if you looted it from a monster. Let's go through what you know about its effects."

Jason and Clive continued to discuss their project until it was time for Jason to make lunch.

“I’m not sure we can move forward without consulting someone who understands cloud flask construction,” Clive said. “Unfortunately, that’s extremely rare. I’ve only ever heard of diamond-rankers making them.”

“Emir is probably our best bet there,” Jason said. “He knows who created both of our flasks.”

“It will probably have to wait until after the surge is over, then,” Clive said. “It’s still hard just getting a water link slot. As for Emir showing up in person, I think there’s still a standing order for his arrest.”

Jason put on a big spread of salads and sandwiches because the cloud house was unusually full. His friends were always busy, even Taika, who had been going out on delivery runs to low-danger zones with other bronze-rankers. Travis was holed up on some kind of project, frequently with Farrah, which they had thus far refused to tell anyone the details of. Dawn had been out of town since the battle with the Builder cities, as she still had valuable guidance to offer places where the Builder was an imminent threat. She had just arrived back in Rimaros, however, and quietly paid a visit to the cloud house.

Today, everyone happened to be free at the same time, if only for a few hours and it was a full house. Dawn was sitting next to Jason at a long table covered in food as everyone tucked merrily in. She watched, bemused as she enjoyed a social gathering unlike any she had experienced in many centuries.

“You have a talent for making people overlook the difference in rank,” she said to Jason. “Even modulating my aura to put people at ease, they are rarely so unreserved around me."

“Sounds lonely,” Jason said. “But that was why the World-Phoenix sent you instead of some lackey to ride herd on me, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was uncertain, at first. Inhabiting a powerless avatar gave me many experiences I had forgotten from the distant past. It took me some time to understand why it was valuable to the World-Phoenix.”

“It wasn’t just for your wellbeing?” Belinda asked, sitting on the other side of Dawn to Jason. While there was still a level of reverential trepidation to the silver ranker from Clive and Humphrey especially, Belinda shared Jason’s preference for judging people by criteria other than rank.

“The World-Phoenix doesn’t think in those terms,” Dawn explained. “The fact that great astral beings primarily interact with the cosmos through vessels leads people to anthropomorphise them to a degree that isn’t strictly accurate. It’s not just that they don’t think like mortals but that the level they operate on isn’t the same as ours. In some regards they might not even be considered sentient, any more than gravity or heat is sentient.”

“The Builder is an exception, though, isn’t he?” Jason asked.

"Yes," Dawn said. "There are many mysteries surrounding the ascension of the Builder and the sanctioning of his predecessor. Secrets that even I and others like me are not privy to. Those secrets, whatever they may be, are widely considered to be the impetus for the Builder's famously erratic and idiosyncratic behaviour."

“It’s not just about the vessels he uses?” Clive asked, joining in on the conversation.

“That is a part of it,” Dawn said. “A larger part than most realise. I was explaining the World-Phoenix’s purpose in assigning me to watch over Jason. Their vessels, like I used to be, play a much greater role than simply translating the will and intention of the great astral beings. With the possible exception of the Builder, great astral beings are incapable of thinking on a scale as small as the one we operate on. They see things on a cosmic scale; they think of people in numbers so large we don't have words for them. They cannot look at you or I as individuals any more than you can look at the molecules that make up your body.”

“The what?” Clive asked.

“The tiny things that everything is made of,” Jason said. “Don’t tell Knowledge I told you that. Ask Travis about it.”

“What’s that?” Travis asked from the other end of the table.

“I was telling Clive how molecules are the tiny things that everything is made of.”

“That’s not really how that works,” Travis said. “I don’t think Knowledge would like you spreading that kind of thing around.”

“Well, you ask her how much you can tell Clive and leave me out of it,” Jason said. “Dawn, what were you saying about vessels?”

“Vessels aren't just mouthpieces for the great astral beings but the means by which those beings operate on any scale an individual mortal can perceive.”

“Are you saying they need vessels to think for them?” Jason asked.

“It’s vastly more complicated than that,” Dawn said, “but yes, to a large degree. I was the First Sister of the Cult of the World-Phoenix, which essentially made me its leader across a region of the cosmos larger than I can ever expect to see. But I was only one of numbers beyond counting, and between us all, we formed something like a hive mind. A thought engine made up of the most powerful mortals in existence. When you think of the consciousness of a great astral being, this is what you’re actually dealing with. It is possible to commune directly with a great astral being, but only for those who have spent years in preparing to become a prime vessel. Doing so is unlike anything I can begin to describe, however. It is to touch the infinite; it cannot be encapsulated.”

“I know a guy who’ll sell you mushrooms that do something similar,” Belinda said.

“Lindy!” Clive scolded as Jason chuckled and Dawn shook her head with a bemused expression.

"My larger point is," Dawn explained, "that the World-Phoenix doesn't care about me or my wellbeing because it can't. What it can recognise is when a tool, in this case, me, is not functioning the way it should. There is a limit to mortal power and I have reached it. As you might imagine, that kind of power affects you in various ways. You will come to understand this more as you realise how gold and diamonds ranks are not like the ones that came before, but that still lies ahead.”

"How so?" Humphrey asked, joining in. "My mother said something very similar to me after she got to gold-rank."

“What else did she tell you?” Dawn asked.

“That I’d learn more when I got stronger.”

"There you are, then," Dawn told him. "But as Jason said, that kind of power can be lonely. Even enemies are somewhat friends because there are so few who know what you know and have seen what you've seen. It's isolating, taking you away from mortality, both literally and figuratively. I am not much easier to kill than a god."

"It's possible to kill gods?" Humphrey asked.

"No," Dawn said. "It isn't. The point is, it becomes easy to let what you are consume who you are until nothing is left. I may no longer be the direct vessel of the World-Phoenix but I am still connected to it and always will be. My purpose and role in its service is forever and I am proud of that. But that role is of a mortal representative. I now realise how removed I had become from mortal sensibilities, drifting too far from what the World-Phoenix needs me to be. As a tool, I had become a hammer with no head.”

“So your boss sent you to me, knowing I’d drag you into the muck,” Jason said.

“It’s not quite that simple, but more or less,” Dawn told him. “And I thank you for doing so.”

“Yeah, no worries,” Jason said. “Can you pass me that fire-plum sauce?”

***

Liara had taken the unusual step of allowing a Shade body to occupy her shadow. She wanted to know the moment that he learned any new information. Unfortunately, Shade’s bodies that had hitched a ride with the Purity worshippers had been sealed from communication by whatever protections the enemy facilities boasted. Contact was cut off from the moment they entered the underwater vessels the enemies used. Shade could tell no more than that his bodies were still intact and not under any duress.

“Anything?” she asked as she sat in an office in the Adventure Society building. She was not using her own secure office because the shielding around the Builder response unit’s facilities would cut Shade off as effectively as the Purity stronghold.

“Nothing new,” Shade said.

“Sorry,” she told him. “I know you would tell me, yet I’m asking every few minutes.”

“Sorry for what?” Shade asked.

“For being annoying.”

“You do realise whose familiar I am, don’t you? I am older than some of this world’s gods and my knowledge base now includes a comprehensive understanding of the canonicity of various entries to the Knight Rider franchise.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I am not largely an advocate for ignorance,” Shade said, “but in this instance, I offer with all goodwill my hope that you retain yours in perpetuity.”

There was a knock at the door and Liara called her assistant in. It was an adventure society functionary assigned to her for administrative purposes, rather than one of her subordinate adventurers.

“Lord Cassin Amouz has arrived,” the functionary informed her.

“Thank you. Show him in.”